Mobile workers’ rights split the EU, Commission

A battle over how to treat Europe’s increasingly mobile workers — and the Continent’s legions of long-distance truckers — is threatening to put immense stress on the single market as Brussels prepares to tackle the intertwined issues this year.

New rules on some 2 million posted workers, the term for workers sent from their home countries to work temporarily in another country, being drafted by the EU institutions are aimed at ironing out an imbalance within the bloc between low- and high-wage countries.

While many richer Western European countries support the reform as a way of protecting their workforce, complaining that the existing situation is unfair to their businesses, poorer countries — many of them in Central Europe — decry that the effort will undercut their competitiveness.

“My conviction is that we have to pay, in the same way, workers wherever they are,” said European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker at the end of July.

The Commission wants to tighten up a decades-old law by making sure workers are protected even when posted abroad. Under the Commission proposal being floated among the institutions, the length an employee could be posted abroad would be capped at 24 months.

Part of the furor comes because low-wage countries like Poland and Romania can be mined for cheap labor by so-called letterbox company outposts, with staff then sent to work in Western Europe for lower salaries and under skimpier social security provisions than the local labor force — a practice critics in Paris, Berlin and Vienna call social dumping.

Both member countries and MEPs in the European Parliament are slated to find their own common positions on the rules before year-end.

Meanwhile, there is a parallel effort to bring in separate legislation specifically for truckers: Here, Juncker wants to put an end to nomadic drivers roaming Europe’s motorways, sleeping and eating at the roadside.

However, those plans are dividing countries, and also causing splits in Juncker’s own team.

The Commission’s transport department wanted truckers to be allowed to work in a foreign country for seven days before falling under local labor rules. But Juncker knocked that down to three days in the final posted workers proposal to appease Paris and Berlin.

When commissioners discussed the second trucking-specific proposal in June, one Central European commissioner openly dissented, an EU official in the room said.

France, Germany and Austria have attempted to take matters into their own hands, passing national laws compelling road transport firms to pay local minimum wages whenever drivers operate on their territory — an effort the Commission rejected, stating it infringes the EU’s single market.

The dispute over how to set labor rules has thrown up some unlikely alliances across the bloc.

In Warsaw during the summer, Spain’s Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy said he did not agree that “one country should set the allowances and compensation of people that live in one country but go to work in another.”

That chimed with Poland’s Prime Minister Beata Szydło, who has raged at the construction of “barriers obstructing the freedom of movement of persons, services and capital” within the single market.

“It is a divide between high- and low-wage countries, this is the real problem,” said Luca Visentini, general secretary of the European Trade Union Confederation. “Among the cheap labor countries you have not only the Eastern countries but also those affected by [austerity] measures.”

Austerity-hit countries like Spain, Portugal, Greece and Ireland are aligning with low-wage countries such as Poland and Hungary, Visentini said.

“The problem that I see inside the Council is that it is divided in two parts: the Northern countries — Germany, Benelux and France — then parts of Eastern and Southern Europe,” Luxembourg’s Transport Minister François Bausch said.

Bausch called on low-wage countries to “make an effort to change their mentality” on enforcement of posted transport workers. However, Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico — in Brussels in July representing his regional counterparts in talks with Juncker — said he wants a “fair compromise” on posted workers, speaking of the “pressures” on Slovakia.

The Parliament and Council are poised to set their positions on the more general posted worker reform in the autumn, with MEPs scheduled to vote on their draft text in late September and labor ministers heading for a summit in Luxembourg on October 23 to set out their position.

The trucker-specific proposal will take longer, with country attachés and MEPs only now beginning to draft their version of the Commission’s three-day proposal, something that will take months to sort out. Bausch said he isn’t expecting progress before 2019.

With early lobbying efforts focused on the posted workers regulation, Visentini spent months seeking to persuade everyone from French President Emmanuel Macron to the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier that workers’ rights must be protected.

He said keeping road transport in the general directive is a “Maginot Line” for the unions, because it will be introduced much sooner. “Instead of insisting on perfection, we prefer to have a good compromise,” Visentini said.

Only after that broad regulation is cleared will attention turn to how to tweak rules for the road transport industry, he said.

Peter Lundgren, a former truck driver and a Swedish MEP for the Europe of Freedom and Direct Democracy, a Euroskeptic faction, said rules must make sure workers regularly return to their host countries.

“I saw the mess that developed on the road,” Lundgren said, adding the sector had “exploded” over the last decade with what he estimates are 4,000 foreign-registered trucks who barely ever leave Sweden, many from Bulgaria and Romania. “It is not possible for Swedish companies to compete with that,” Lundgren said.

The difficulty in reconciling the many different views is that the issue of wage competition and posted workers goes to the heart of the single market and key EU freedoms of movement and labor.

“The biggest challenge is ... to make sure that the creation of a social Europe allows for free movement across all of Europe,” said French MEP Élisabeth Morin-Chartier, who is helping to steer the Parliament’s position on the dossier.